Cooper v. Aaron, 1958

Opinion of the Court by the Chief Justice and Justices Black, Frankfurter,
Douglas, Burton, Clark, Harlan, Brennan, and Whittaker.

As this case reaches us it raises questions of the highest importance
to the maintenance of our federal system of government. It necessarily
involves a claim by the Governor and Legislature of a State that there
is no duty on state officials to obey federal court orders resting on this
Court's considered interpretation of the United States Constitution. Specifically
it involves actions by the Governor and Legislature of Arkansas upon the
premise that they are not bound by our holding in Brown v. Board of Education...
That holding was that the Fourteenth Amendment forbids States to use their
governmental powers to bar children on racial grounds from attending schools
where there is state participation through any arrangement, management,
funds, or property. We are urged to uphold a suspension of the Little Rock
School Board's plan to do away with segregated public schools in Little
Rock until state laws have been further challenged and tested in the courts.
We reject these contentions.

The case was argued before us on September 11, 1958. On the following
day we unanimously affirmed the judgement of the Court of Appeals for the
Eighth District of Arkansas...The District Court had granted the application
of the petitioners, the Little Rock School Board and School Superintendent,
to suspend for two and one-half years the operation of the School Board's
court-approved desegregation program. In order that the School Board might
know, without doubt, its duty in this regard before the opening of school,
which had been set for the following Monday, September 15, 1958, we immediately
issued the judgement, reserving the expression of our supporting views
to a later date. This opinion of all of the members of the Court embodies
those views...

In affirming the judgement of the Court of Appeals which reversed the
District Court we have accepted without reservation the position of the
School Board, the Superintendent of Schools, and their counsel that they
dis-played entire good faith in the conduct of these proceedings and in
dealing with the unfortunate and distressing sequence of events which has
been outlined. We likewise have accepted the findings of the District Court
as to the conditions at Central High School during the 1957-1958 school
year, and also the find-ings that the educational progress of all the students,
white and colored, of that school has suffered and will continue to suffer
if the conditions which prevailed last year are permitted to continue.

The significance of these findings, however, is to be considered in
the light of the fact, indisputably revealed by the record before us, that
the conditions they depict are directly traceable to the actions of legislatures
and executive officials of the State of Arkansas, taken in their official
capacities, which reflect their own determination to resist this Court's
decision in the Brown case and which have brought about violent resistance
to that decision in Arkansas. In its petition for certiorari filed in this
Court, the School Board itself describes the situation in this language:
"The legislative, executive, and judicial departments of the state
government opposed the desegregation of Little Rock schools by enacting
laws, calling out troops, making statements vilifying federal law and federal
courts, and failing to utilize state law enforcement agencies and judicial
process to maintain public peace."

One may well sympathize with the position of the Board in the face of
the frustrating conditions which have confronted it, but, regardless of
the Board's good faith, the actions of the other state agencies responsible
for those conditions compel us to reject the Board's legal position. Had
Central High School been under the direct management of the State itself,
it could hardly be suggested that those immediately in charge of the school
should be heard to assert their own good faith as a legal excuse for delay
in implementing the constitutional rights of these respondents, when vindication
of those rights was rendered difficult or impossible by the actions of
other state officials. The situation here is no different posture because
the members of the School Board and the Superintendent of Schools are local
officials; from the point of view of the Fourteenth Amendment, they stand
in this litigation as the agents of the State.

The constitutional rights of respondents are not to be sacrificed or
yielded to the violence and disorder which have followed upon the actions
of the Governor and Legislature. As this Court said some 41 years ago in
a unanimous opinion in a case involving another aspect of racial segregation:
"It is urged that this proposed segregation will promote the public
peace by preventing race conflicts. Desirable as this is, and important
as is the preservation of the public peace, this aim cannot be accomplished
by laws or ordinances which deny the rights created or protected by the
Federal Constitution." Buchanan v. Warley... Thus law and order are
not here to be preserved by depriving the Negro children of their constitutional
rights. The record before us clearly establishes that the growth of the
Board's difficulties to a magnitude beyond its unaided power to control
is the product of state action. Those difficulties, as counsel for the
Board forthrightly conceded on the oral argument in this Court, can also
be brought under control by state action.

The controlling legal principles are plain. The command of the Fourteenth
Amendment is that no "State" shall deny to any person within
its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws...

What has been said, in the light of the facts developed, is enough to
dispose of the case. However, we should answer the premise of the actions
of the Governor and Legislature that they are not bound by our holding
in the Brown case. It is necessary only to recall some basic constitutional
propositions which are settled doctrine.

Article VI of the Constitution makes the Constitution the "supreme
Law of the Land." In 1803, Chief Justice Marshall, speaking for a
unanimous Court, referring to the Constitution as "the fundamental
and paramount law of the nation," declared in the notable case of
Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177, that "It is emphatically the
province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."
This decision declared the basic principle that the federal judiciary is
supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution, and that principle
has ever since been respected by this Court and the Country as a permanent
and indispensable feature of our constitutional system. It follows that
the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment enunciated by this Court
in the Brown case is the supreme law of the land, and Art. VI of the Constitution
makes it of binding effect on the States "any Thing in the Constitution
or Laws of any States to the Contrary notwithstanding." Every state
legislator and executive and judicial officer is solemnly committed by
oath taken pursuant to Art. VI, cl. 3, "to support this Constitution."...

No state legislator or executive or judicial officer can war against
the Constitution without violating his undertaking to support it. Chief
Justice Marshall spoke for a unanimous Court in saying that: "If the
legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgements of
the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under
those judgements, the constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery..."
United States v. Peters... A Governor who asserts a power to nullify a
federal court order is similarly restrained. If he had such power, said
Chief Justice Hughes, in 1932, also for a unanimous Court, "it is
manifest that the fiat of a state Governor, and not the Constitution of
the United States, would be the supreme law of the land; that the restriction
of the Federal Constitution upon the exercise of state power would be but
impotent phrases..." Sterling v. Constantin...

It is, of course, quite true that the responsibility for public education
is primarily the concern of the States, but it is equally true that such
responsibilities, like all other state activity, must be exercised consistently
with federal constitutional requirements as they apply to state action.
The Constitution created a government dedicated to equal justice under
law. The Fourteenth Amendment embodied and emphasized that ideal. State
support of segregated schools through any arrangement, management, funds,
or property cannot be squared with the Amendment's command that no State
shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of
the laws. The right of a student not to be segregated on racial grounds
in schools so maintained is indeed so fundamental and pervasive that it
is embraced in the concept of due process of law... The basic decision
in Brown was unanimously reached by this Court only after the case had
been briefed and twice argued and the issues had been given the most serious
consideration. Since the first Brown opinion three new Justices have come
to the Court. They are at one with the Justices still on the Court who
participated in that basic decision as to its correctness, and that decision
and the obedience of the States to them, according to the command of the
Constitution, are indispensable for the protection of the freedoms guaranteed
by our fundamental charter for all of us. Our constitutional ideal of equal
justice under law is thus made a living truth.